Biotech in Agriculture: Blessing or Curse?

For personal reasons, I pay more attention than I might otherwise to doings in Omaha, Nebraska (a niece of mine lives there).  As I write this, they're enduring a blizzard with up to 50-MPH winds, temperatures near zero, and up to a foot of snow coming down.  Most of them, that is.  The governor, on the other hand, a Republican named Pete Ricketts, is at the Agricultural Outlook Forum outside Washington, DC participating in a panel discussion of biotechnology in farming. 

In a brief interview that appeared in the Omaha World-Herald, Ricketts painted a glowing future of apples that don't turn brown, salmon that grow faster, and other developments that will feed an increasing population.  Almost in the same breath, he admitted that the public's view of genetic engineering is skeptical, and environmental groups criticize large-scale farming for the effect it has on climate change.  The panel that Ricketts was scheduled to participate in at the forum is called "The Evolving Regulatory Landscape and Adoption of Precision Agriculture." 

Biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, are specialized topics that most people know a little bit about, but only a few people know a lot about.  In such cases, the few who know a lot have both the privilege and responsibility to use their knowledge wisely.  But wisdom in one person's view may be folly to another.

The tension that Gov. Ricketts pointed out in his interview with the Omaha World-Herald involves two camps or lines of thought.  For simplicity, we'll call them biotech optimists and biotech pessimists.  The optimists, which evidently include the Governor and his fellow panelists at the forum (a biotech scientist and two biotech-firm executives), believe that biotech will improve agriculture and make good-quality food more available.  We should bear in mind that increasingly, farming these days is big farming:  large corporations operating huge spreads with highly mechanized processes that employ fewer people all the time per unit of product made.  That's just the definition of increased productivity, and it's a driving force behind biotech and most other production-oriented businesses these days. 

The biotech pessimists are a more varied group.  They are no doubt responsible for a good bit of the regulatory landscape mentioned in the forum's title.  Some of the reasons for regulation are protection of endangered species, abatement of water and air pollution (have you ever driven within a few hundred yards of an old-style pig farm?—you'd remember it if you did), and prevention of unlikely but devastating disasters that might happen from genetic engineering experiments gone wrong.  The positions of such pessimists range from mild (horse-trading adjustments to regulations in cooperation with biotech industries) to extreme (abolishing all genetic engineering from the planet), but they are united in their opposition to simply letting biotech optimists do whatever they want, with no restrictions whatsoever.

In a well-running democracy, these opposing interest groups make their opinions and facts known and reach a compromise in cooperation with legislative bodies—a compromise that both allows useful advances in biotechnology and avoids the worst harms that can result from it.  Whether this democracy of ours is running that well is a question for another time.

A factor that has to be added to this mix in recent years is the increasingly international nature of all trade, including trade in farm commodities.  One hard fact that Gov. Ricketts mentioned is that Nebraska's farm income for 2018 is expected to be the lowest since 2002, and one factor in that decline is the downward pressure on prices due to international free trade in farm products.  Adam Smith's invisible hand is at work here, making sure that in an ideal world of free trade, the price for each commodity is established by the most efficient producer worldwide, leading to an overall maximum efficiency.  Mathematically, the principle is irrefutable, but mathematics takes no cognizance of nations, cultures, customs, or traditions.

The biotech optimists tend to be on Adam Smith's side, if for no other reason than if we don't take the next step in biotech improvements, somebody else will and they'll undercut us productivity-wise.  In other words, if we don't beat them at their own game, we lose.  The pessimists would step in and question the propriety of the whole game. 

Without farming, we wouldn't have civilization at all—no universities, no cities, no modern conveniences, no science, and no people—well, almost no people, by comparison to what the globe supports now.  Any nation with a considerable land mass suitable for farming is going to have to deal with the question of how that farming is conducted:  whether it is protected from adverse influences such as foreign competition and excessive regulation that would threaten its existence, or whether it is left to fend for itself, which in a democracy gets increasingly difficult as the number of people directly and indirectly supported by farming dwindle.  If you read agrarians such as Wendell Berry, you will conclude that in the U. S., we have largely taken the latter course, treating farming increasingly like we treat the military:  as the sole preoccupation of a few specialists we need pay no attention to, as long as they do for us what we want. 

But such neglect is a recipe for long-term disaster.  Taking any group of people for granted—farmers, soldiers, engineers, even politicians—is to treat them as means, and not ends in themselves:  human beings like us who deserve attention, justice, and mercy.  I do not have all the answers, or even a few of them, regarding how much biotechnology is enough.  But farmers perform an increasingly neglected service to us all, whether here or abroad.  And I hope that we don't sacrifice farming communities for the sake of free trade, or freedom from genetically-modified crops, or any other ideal shibboleth that looks good on paper, but would wreak havoc among people we may never meet, but upon whom we depend for every bite we put in our mouths. 

Sources:  The Omaha World-Herald carried the article "Ricketts joins panel on farming biotechnology during D. C. visit, calls for productivity, innovation" on Feb. 22, 2019 at https://www.omaha.com/news/nation/morton/ricketts-joins-panel-on-farming-biotechnology-during-d-c-visit/article_d6e45688-f4f4-545b-b624-b8dafcddad9f.html.  The Agricultural Outlook Forum's website is at https://www.usda.gov/oce/forum/. 

Of Pecans, Profits, and Piety

Broadly speaking, the system of international trade we live under is a kind of technology.  It’s certain that without modern engineered means of transportation and communications, international markets would be much less significant than they are today.  And while the particular story I’m going to relate pertains to the oldest technology in human history, namely farming, the lesson behind it applies to many fields of engineering.

The pecan tree is the state tree of Texas.  (In case you’ve never heard a Texan say it, it’s pronounced “puh-cawn”).  Pecan trees can grow to a height of 100 feet (30 meters) or more, live up to 1000 years, and for most of those years can produce an abundant annual crop of tasty, highly edible nuts.  When my late grandfather moved to Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, he planted a pecan tree in his back yard.  The last time I visited his house (currently occupied by other relatives), that tree was still going strong, providing shade for most of the back yard and a good bit of the house too.  Pecan trees are native to Texas and grace thousands of acres of river banks and bottom lands, besides furnishing an important food crop to pecan growers who grow hundreds of different varieties.  Pecans are sold both for direct consumption, either in the shell or hulled, and also as ingredients for processed food that benefit from the addition of chopped or blended pecans.  But until about a decade ago, the pecan market was almost entirely domestic, with a good number being sold mainly in Texas.

Then someone in China caught on to the fact that the huge market there for snack nuts, sold often in vending machines in locations such as gas stations and convenience stores, might benefit from imported pecans.  Up until then, most of the snack nuts sold were Chinese walnuts, but the cheaper pecan tastes just as good (in my opinion, anyway), and some clever Chinese importers introduced the new nut to Chinese consumers around 2001.

They liked it—liked it so much that since 2007, shipments of pecans to China from the U. S. (which includes exports from relatively new pecan-growing states such as Georgia and New Mexico as well as Texas) averaged almost 60 million pounds annually.  But there is a fly in this profitable ointment, which is the fact that the Chinese market wants a particular kind of “improved” pecan, not the rich variety of our native pecans.

According to an article in Texas Monthly by James McWilliams, the hybrid improved pecans have a uniform size, uniformly thin shells, and uniform quality.  These improved varieties will work in the Chinese vending machines, which can’t handle the variation in shapes and sizes of native varieties.  Texas pecan growers have known about the Chinese market for years, but so far they have exhibited a marked reluctance to chop down their existing groves, many of which are native varieties, to plant the improved type that produces machine-vendable pecans.   In so doing, they are losing year by year a potential market that could allow Texas to surpass the newer pecan-growing states and once more lead the nation in pecan exports.

That takes care of pecans and profits; now for the piety.  I have been reading a book called Food & Faith, a work of theological musings about the connections between eating and Christianity.  The author, Norman Wirzba, relies on the works of agrarians such as Wendell Berry as well as more explicitly theological writers.  But I was struck by the following passage from the book as expressing exactly what is going on between the Chinese pecan market and Texas pecan growers:  “Food that may have begun in the ground [or on a tree] must lose all traces of soil, sunlight, and fragile plant and animal life so that it can be redesigned, engineered [!], improved, packaged, stored, and delivered in whatever ways the food producer sees fit.”  Wirzba’s book, among many other things, is an impassioned plea to stop thinking about food and eating merely in material and economic terms. 

Viewed one way, it only makes sense for Texas pecan farmers to replant their groves with machine-friendly pecan trees, for the more efficient production of pecans that will contribute to the efficient international trade that efficiently fills vending machines with pecans that Chinese consumers can eat to fuel the machines called their bodies. 

But viewed another way, there is incalculable value in tending native pecan trees which are so deeply connected at multiple levels to a part of the world that Texans, at least, view as God’s country.  Not that His title to the rest of the world is defective in any serious way.  But as a recent arrival here from California said to me the other day, “Texans seem to have a loyalty to their state that I haven’t noticed anywhere else.”  And native pecan trees are part of what makes Texas the place it is.  I find reassuring the fact that just down the road from where I live, in Seguin, you can visit Pape’s Pecan Nutcracker Museum, and view both stationary and portable World’s Largest Pecans.  One is a concrete model on a pedestal on the town square, and the other, welded out of steel, is mounted on a trailer for convenient towing in parades.  And I would like to think that at least part of the reason that Texas pecan growers haven’t done the economically sensible and efficient thing of whacking down all their old-fashioned native trees to plant new ones for the Chinese market, is that, well, there’s more important things than money. 

It takes ten years for a new pecan sapling to mature enough to start producing.  That induces a natural tendency in pecan farmers to take the long view.  Ten years from now, the Chinese may have dropped pecans for Brazil nuts, for all I know.  But the rich biological and cultural heritage represented by the native pecan trees of Texas will live on, I hope, for many generations to come.

Sources:  I learned about the Chinese pecan market from James McWilliams’ article “Shell Game” in the Sept. 2013 edition of Texas Monthly.  It is an excerpt from his book The Pecan:  A History of America’s Native Nut to be published in October 2013.  I also referred to an online article about the pecan market posted by Nature’s Finest Foods Ltd. (a brokerage firm) at http://www.nffonline.com/industry-news/2013/06/19/pecan-exports-china-falter and an item by the Whitney Consulting Group posted on Google Docs (account required) at https://docs.google.com/file/d/1l9XwHsObwgS8O9OERlQwUqaF_IEoBXSVhQLpcnLvwnLpB_fwr-kY1pSeeVdl/edit.  Norman Wirzba’s Food & Faith:  A Theology of Eating was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.

Wendell Berry and the Two Economies

Modern engineering as it is currently practiced is deeply embedded in the context of the global economy of modern industrial societies. Large corporations are the only organizations complex enough to coordinate the production of things as intricate as computers or airliners. So when someone such as writer and philosopher Wendell Berry criticizes the economic basis on which current engineering depends, his words are worth considering for their indirect implication that engineering, too, in some respects, is a house built on sand.

In an essay entitled “Two Economies,” Berry first recognizes the thing we usually mean when we say “economy”: a global system of exchange based on what is called fiat money—money that is a creature of governments which, as the U. S. Federal Reserve recently announced plans to do, can create as much as $600 billion out of thin air over a period of a few months. And that is one of Berry’s complaints about that economy: the fact that it is not based on anything beyond the say-so of certain powerful people and interests who attempt to control it to their advantage.

But beyond the thing that is usually meant by “the economy” lies an all-encompassing principle or entity that Berry chooses to call the Great Economy. It is, he says, “. . . the ultimate condition of our experience and of the practical questions rising from our experience” and is “both known and unknown, visible and invisible, comprehensible and mysterious.” The idea of the Great Economy makes no sense outside of religious considerations, but that need not detain us, since every great classical religion says something meaningful about the Great Economy, though not in those terms.

In contrast to the human-created economy which is to some extent manageable, the Great Economy cannot be managed. It can only be conformed to by individuals and groups who acknowledge their inability to be fundamentally in control of their existence. Only when we admit that can we go about the business of constructing a human economy that works according to the terms of the Great Economy.

How would the world’s economy change if it conformed more to the Great Economy? I can mention only a couple of Berry’s ideas in the limited space available here. One is to cease viewing the various goods of the Great Economy as resources to be exploited. Berry says of the modern industrial economy that the “invariable mode of its relation both to nature and to human culture is that of mining: withdrawal from a limited fund until that fund is exhausted.” According to Berry, the industrial economy acknowledges no limits and recognizes no ultimate goals: it “cannot prescribe the terms of its own success.”

Berry sees much that is fundamentally wrong with things that most of us take for granted and rarely think about. He is not surprised that proponents of free enterprise end up so often on the dockets of criminal courts, and that much of modern medicine has become an “exploitive industry, profitable in direct proportion to its hurry and its mechanical indifference.” The reason is that as long as one never looks beyond the limits of a human-created economy, one ignores the Great Economy at his peril. But such ignorance comes at a price, and billions of people around the world pay that price every day.

Berry is probably the leading living proponent of the philosophical and economic movement called agrarianism. More than just a simplistic back-to-the-farm philosophy, agrarianism sees humanity in a holistic way that views work, leisure, money, community, and government as integrated parts of the Great Economy. One of the first arguments most engineers might think of when confronting the ideas of agrarianism is that if everybody tried to live out its principles, our present way of life would be destroyed. Not everybody can live as a subsistence farmer, or even has the interest, ability, or resources for such a life.

But that argument is itself taken from the industrial-economy playbook, which instantly takes any proposal and tries to homogenize it, duplicate it, and apply it worldwide. Those very actions are counter to agrarian principles, which are primarily local, personal, and can take form only in the context of small communities where people know each other. And in fact, as Berry points out, there are thousands of Amish farmers and other members of certain religious communities (including monasteries) where a good bit of the agrarian ideal works in practice.

So what should an engineer take away from Berry’s picture of the Great Economy that surrounds our human economies like a family home encompasses children in a back-yard treehouse? Well, short of dropping out and joining an Amish community, religion and all, I think engineers could benefit in several ways from thinking about Berry’s ideas. No plans turn out quite the way we expect, for one thing. That sounds like a restatement of Murphy’s Law (“if anything can go wrong, it will”), but in fact it is an admission that the imponderable and unpredictable, especially if human beings are involved, can easily overwhelm the calculable and certain. And thinking about the people who ultimately use the things engineers work on, and the cultural and spiritual contexts of their lives, is something we could all do more of, to the benefit of both society and our own organizations.

Many of the dire predictions Berry has made over the years have either come to pass to some degree, or are so much a chronic condition of our times that we have ceased to notice them. But we can sometimes learn more from our critics than from our friends, and I would urge anyone who has never read anything by Wendell Berry to do so soon.

Sources: Berry’s essay “Two Economies” appears in a collected edition of his essays entitled The Art of the Commonplace (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), pp. 219-235.

What Is Distributism, and Why Should Engineers Care?

Engineering is an unavoidably economic activity, since it always involves applying knowledge to achieve an end within the constraint of limited resources. Engineers have worked under every kind of economic system from radical Communism to the nearly unrestrained free market of places like Singapore. There seems to be a growing consensus that the only kind of economic system with a future is free-market capitalism, which even the leaders of the Peoples' Republic of China have embraced. I will now take moment during this more-than-usually-political season to introduce you to a system that is more than economics and really more than politics, but would profoundly change both if it was adopted seriously. It is a third alternative to capitalism or socialism which almost no one has heard of: distributism.

Historically, distributism was the way most economies operated in most parts of the world for centuries until the rise of the mercantile states in the seventeenth century, when capitalism began to take its modern form. Then socialism arose as an attempt to correct the flaws of capitalism, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Both capitalism and socialism share many concepts in common, including the philosophical assumption that man is Homo economicus: that is, the most important thing about man is his economic activity and behavior. Socialism puts the government in charge of the economy and capitalism bows to the free market, but both systems assume that when you have solved the economic problem, you have solved the most important problems.

Distributism, which had its heyday in England in the 1930s, starts from a different place altogether. It says that the economy was made for man, and not man for the economy.

Here's a little quiz: how many of the following items do you find appealing? Never mind how they would come about, just react positively or negatively to each:

--- Working at home, rather than in an office at the end of a long commute
--- Eating fresh fruits and vegetables you grew yourself or bought from a local farmer
--- Owning your own business
--- Being better off economically for having children rather than the reverse
--- Buying things made and sold by people who live in your neighborhood

None of these things are impossible or cloud-cuckoo-land pipe dreams. Millions of Americans enjoy one or more of them every day. All these things, and more that space doesn't allow me to list, are pieces of a distributist program that would encourage movement toward the wider distribution of ownership of productive property. That is distributism in a nutshell.

Where would engineers fit in a distributist economy? That is a good question, but one I would have to take time off and write a book about to answer adequately. Because large-scale capitalism is so deeply entrenched worldwide, most engineers work for firms that are either large multinationals themselves or depend on them. It is silly to pretend that you could take a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor foundry and turn it into dozens of little mom-and-pop IC plants spread all over the world. But it may seem silly simply because no one has thought along those lines for decades.

Many technical innovations that have taken place since the 1930s are potentially very friendly to a distributist economy. For instance, before the advent of the Internet it was impossible for a three-person company with limited capital to do worldwide marketing of any kind. There were simply no advertising media that such a small company could afford. Now all it takes is a website and maybe some translation software, and there you are. Already many firms are outsourcing specific engineering functions to private contractors, although in a haphazard way motivated by capitalistic concerns rather than other factors. The profession of engineering itself began largely as a group of quasi-independent professionals with what amounted to consulting practices, rather than as large staffs of wage-earning employees, which is the norm today.

These are idle musings at this point, admittedly, but the point is that bigger is not always better, and more means exist today to make small, owner-operated engineering firms viable than possibly ever before. There will always be a need for large organizations to deal with large projects such as aerospace programs, public works, and so on. But they need not be the rule-–one day they could be the rare exception in a distributist economy, in which most engineers would work either for themselves or in small local firms.

After decades of neglect, distributism is now seeing something of a renaissance, with books and websites showing up with some regularity. One of distributism's most prominent early exponents was the British author G. K. Chesterton, whose writings on distributism (The Outline of Sanity, Utopia of Usurers) are easier to find than some others. Wendell Berry, an author and farmer associated with what is known as the Southern Agrarian movement, takes positions that are often sympathetic with distributist principles. The Amish, who are often thought to eschew all forms of technology, actually take advantage of certain carefully chosen modern technologies, but only after carefully considering how its use will affect their individual and communal life.

You will probably never see a distributist candidate for President or a Distributist Party playing power politics. It is inherently a small-scale, local movement, but for that reason it can be much easier to live a practical distributist life here and now, in some ways, than it is to become an instant successful capitalist, for instance. If you think my treatment of distributism has been wacky and out of place, I promise not to bring it up again at least till after the November elections. But it's not impossible to imagine engineers doing well and doing good in a distributist economy as well as in the one we have now. And maybe, just maybe, things might be better than they are.

Sources: Books such as Distributist Perspectives I and II and Beyond Capitalism and Socialism are available from IHS Press (www.ihspress.com), which also publishes other works of Catholic social thought, where distributism finds many of its origins. On the web there are peppery blogs and information on distributism to be found in The Distributist Review at http://www.distributism.blogspot.com. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine carried an excellent article by Jameson Wetmore on the Amish and their attitude toward technology in its Summer 2007 issue, pp. 10-21.